Most people stopped forwarding stuff to me in the late 1990s, because I usually fact checked what they sent and sent long replies, copying everyone they sent the forward to. No, forwarding this email will not help Rachel Arlington. No, nobody paid $250 for a cookie recipe.

But my aunt sent me a forward about health care, and I couldn’t stop myself.

I am sick of the rampant misinformation campaign funded and hyped by special interest lobbies to derail health care reform, and I would like this email to stop circulating.

But even more interesting is the connection this email reveals between birthers and deathers.

The email, entitled “Constitutionality Of The Health Care Bill” begins,

Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

The only place with a rebuttal is Media Matters, but I didn’t find their approach very thorough. I did my own googling on the matter, and this is what I wrote in response:

Thanks for the forward. The debate about health care is very important, but it’s also important that the debate is an honest one. And Michael Connelly isn’t being honest with you.

To start with, he indirectly claims he is a constitutional law scholar, which is misleading. He has a blog, and he teaches unaccredited law courses online at Education To Go (ed2go.com). It is true that he is a retired lawyer who hasn’t practiced since at least 2001, he does have a JD, and he has also been a substitute high school teacher.

More interesting is his 18 year connection to the US Justice Foundation, which hopes to “advance the conservative viewpoint in the judicial arena.” Having a JD does not prevent one from being an ideologue, and Michael Connelly has been working with a group of “activist lawyers” to change US law. Their recent focus has been litigating on Obama’s birth certificate, which in my opinion is all that needs to be said about how (un)credible their legal viewpoints are, since Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate has been produced and verified on several occasions.

Because I referred to the non profit group the US Justice Foundation as extreme, I thought I should explain why.

Their Executive Director is Gary Kreep has served as general counsel to the Minutemen Civil Defense Corpse – a militant nativist group which the SPLC considers “extremist.” He has been honored by Operation Rescue, a group that seeks to end abortion in the name of Jesus, even by violent means. He is a co-founder of The Family Values Coalition and has served as their president since. The FVC pushes extreme positions involving reproduction, gays, and church/state issues. And he’s been hired by fundamentalist “Christian” pastor Wiley Drake to pursue a lawsuit regarding President Obama’s birth certificate. Drake has told his congregants to pray for Obama’s death. The USFJ has also stated it believes the US government should be able to use assassins to advance its interests. The USFJ receives no stars as a non profit from “Charity Navigator” and has not cooperated with the Better Business Bureau for a rating, but is now receiving large sums from its website defendglenn.com, set up to attract donations from Glenn Beck viewers. The bulk of its million dollar plus budget goes to fundraising and administrative expenses, and Kreep recieves a $144,000 salary from USFJ alone.

The rest of his blog post reiterates sensational talking points from talk radio, which are either distorted or outright untrue, especially the claims about immigrants and abortions. His point about rationing is absurd in a situation where we already have rationed health care, administered by insurance companies for those who have policies, and to an even greater extent we have rationed health care for those who are uninsured or underinsured. He also doesn’t point to any place in the bill(s) where you can check any of what he’s saying, though strangely he provides a link to the Constitution, which everyone should already be familiar with. If you want more information about his specific claims, email me I and can try to put together some stuff for you to look at.

I’m also interested in his claim about the 10th amendment. His interpretation of it is really an extremist view held by far right secessionists and extreme libertarians who do wish the federal government would cease to exist. I’m not sure anyone who is legitimately interested in discussing a national and public good would want to employ their thinking. Under this logic, you should also be opposed to (not just wishing to improve or reform) Social Security, Medicare, the federal highway system, rules regulating airplane safety, and many other national programs that have been good for the vast majority of Americans.

In reality, the Constitution gives congress the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises” and to “provide for….the general welfare of the United States.” It also allows Congress “to regulate commerce… among the several states.” It is under these guidelines that government involvement in health care is definitely constitutional.

These are not average, typical conservatives or Republicans. They have extreme stances, interpretations, and embrace extreme tactics to advance their extreme views, and they profit from it.

Strangely enough, USJF has resurfaced in the news, this time by running a scare scam, asking people to donate $30 in exchange for spam faxes to be sent in their name. Here’s Rachel Maddow’s take on it.

The sad thing is that my aunt thinks I’ve been duped by leftist sources to form my opinion. The above is not an opinion!

I didn’t give my opinion, which is that we should have a single payer, government-run, universal health care system, and I have good reasons for thinking that.

Even though I don’t know whether Connelly and Kreep still work together, connections like this are quite revealing about how ideologues are using non profit infrastructures to spread misinformation online and through other media outlets.

]]>https://mordantsmag.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/email-forwards-from-family/feed/2MordantBut, Look…https://mordantsmag.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/but-look/
https://mordantsmag.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/but-look/#respondMon, 08 Dec 2008 19:51:40 +0000http://mordantsmag.wordpress.com/?p=8I like hearing Obama speak, but one of his verbal tics, the overuse of “look” or “but look” has started to rub me the wrong way.

Obama’s affection for “look”—which he sometimes swaps out for ‘Understand’—may date to his days as an instructor at the University of Chicago law school. The word does have a certain professorial—and some might say, condescending and even belittling—ring to it. The implication: “Look, buddy, here’s why you’re all wet.”

I know we all have our favorite rhetorical strategies. I personally use “perhaps” when I don’t actually mean it.

But, look, if you look at the unemployment numbers that came out yesterday, if you think about almost two million jobs lost so far, if you think about the fragility of the financial system and the fact that it is now a global financial system, so that what happens in Thailand or Russia can have an impact here, and obviously, what happens on Wall Street has an impact worldwide, when you think about the structural problems that we already had in the economy before the financial crisis, this is a big problem and it’s going to get worse.

Well, I’m happy to start with a response. Look, this has been an extraordinary journey that both Senator Clinton and I have been on and a number of other able candidates. And I think very highly of Senator Clinton’s record.

…

But, look, the fact of the matter is, is that both of us are working as hard as we can to make sure that we’re delivering a message to the American people about what we would do as president. Sometimes that message is going to be imperfectly delivered because we are recorded every minute of every day.

…

Well, no, no, look…

…

Look, in my hometown of Chicago, on the south side of Chicago, we’ve had 34 gun deaths last year of Chicago public school children.

And I think that most law-abiding gun owners all across America would recognize that it is perfectly appropriate for local communities and states and the federal government to try to figure out, how do we stop that kind of killing?

People talk a lot about looking in politics, what we might look at and how we should look at it. Clinton used the word “look” a lot too in the debate, as well as “see.” For example

See I think we have to look at what we’re trying to achieve here somewhat differently.

…

And it means taking a hard look at what we need to do

…

And I would look for a way to use all of our former presidents.

Clinton’s usage strikes me as more standard, less noticeable, and far more conditional. She is sometimes assertive with her “see”, but then tempers it with an “I think”. Or she proposes that we “have to look” or “should look”, but then doesn’t go on to say what we should conclude. Obama uses look in this way as well.

But the “but look” from Obama that has caught my attention seems to assume that if we turned our attention to the same evidence he has, we too would come to the same conclusions. Instead of the invitation to entertain another viewpoint that “look” could be, in this case it’s more prescriptive. He’s telling you to share his way of understanding the world. Perhaps this is also more noticeable to me because I find Obama a rather centrist candidate, and when I look, I see the solutions in a much more anticapitalist, lefty way.

I am certainly not suggesting, as some on the right have, that Obama’s repetition is a deliberate attempt to hypnotize us. I don’t even think that the repetition either effectively proscribes the weighing of alternatives or deliberately solicits acquiescence. After all, David Crystal remarks during his defense of SMS abbreviations is that what annoys people about some linguistic oddities is their overuse. The word “like”, he observes, can be a very useful quotative, but when it’s a speaker’s every other word, it sounds terrible.

I think Obama should limit himself to one or two “but, look”s per week, simply because if he’s truly pursuing a strategy of consensus-building, too many “look”s is not rhetorically effective in engaging those who are prone to disagree with him.

]]>https://mordantsmag.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/but-look/feed/0MordantThe Teachings of Jon’s Sisterhttps://mordantsmag.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/the-teachings-of-jons-sister/
https://mordantsmag.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/the-teachings-of-jons-sister/#commentsSun, 07 Dec 2008 22:27:06 +0000http://mordantsmag.wordpress.com/?p=5I saw a documentary called The Teachings of Jon on one of the local public tv stations in 2006. You can check out the “Teachings of Jon” website if you’d like. The documentary was still airing on PBS affiliates around the country as recently as October.

Ostensibly, the film is about how one “normal” family was transformed by the arrival of Jon, a sibling with Down syndrome, and all the great things he has taught them about life after they figure out he’s not a pain, but rather a “magical spirit.” And they do seem to be amused by Jon, much like pet owners with a naughty and active puppy. I was a little horrified by it actually.

There is something…off…about this documentary. Within 5 minutes the family had called him a “little Buddha”, referred to his “slanty eyes”, and played Asian-sounding music. Clearly, someone’s thinking “mongoloid” in all its racist, ableist, and orientalist connotations. You see, Jon’s not like us, the documentary asserts, we who are rational, accomplished, and normal. But that doesn’t mean Jon is useless! We can ignore that we poorly understand him by thinking of him as mystical, and dominate and appropriate Jon’s experiences into our own developmental narratives, where he serves the purposes of a specifically bourgeois teleology of family and career. Jon’s mom learns from Jon:

Jon catalyzed a complete change of values for our family. Before we had Jon we were part of the cocktail party set. After having Jon, things like joining the country club and keeping up with the Jones’s seemed so petty and superficial to us.

Having Jon… made us grow up.

The family insisted that they choose to include Jon fully in their lives, but the truth is that they actually had him institutionalized for the first seven years of his life; furthermore, the parents didn’t even tell their kids they had a sibling. They only brought him home after a caretaker died and they had run out of options.

In a trenchant argument about the necessity of transforming expectations for children with Down syndrome, Michael Berube blogs about the problem of overlooked potential: “And who could have imagined, just forty or fifty years ago, that the children we were institutionalizing and leaving to rot could in fact grow up to become actors?” This, admittedly, was normal at the time Jon’s family institutionalized him. They didn’t see that potential then, and their documentary is surprisingly unreflective about the fact that Jon’s severe developmental problems, including his inability to speak, were probably exacerbated by neglect for the first seven years of his life. Though they admit institutionalizing Jon was a “heart-wrenching” decision, they blame some bad advice and don’t really explore the consequences of their decision.

Their attitude about Jon’s lack of potential turns up in fascinating ways. In an interview, Jennifer Owensby, the movie’s producer, director, and Jon’s sister, says the documentary is not really about Jon after all: “My brother can’t be the main character because my brother never changes. It’s my family and the audience as they’re watching who become the main character.” Casting Jon as a an unchanging, unlearning creature has devastating consequences for Jon’s humanity. After all, even dogs can learn new tricks, and Jon himself learned sign language to communicate with them.

Berube notes that the resources made possible by the ADA Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for children with Down syndrome have themselves made transformation possible: “Early-intervention programs have made such dramatic differences in their lives over the past few decades that we simply do not know what the range of functioning looks like, and therefore do not rightly know what to expect.”

Except that Jon’s family expects that it would be best for Jon to be funny, mystical, but not a disruption. Once they figure about an unchanging routine for Jon, things go more smoothly. A particularly revealing moment came when the mother explained, “He fits right into our lifestyle.”

Admittedly, I don’t know much about living with a person with Down Syndrome, but I did babysit for three different kids who had Down. Yes, working with these kids can be delightful, but it can also be very frustrating, and the documentary didn’t deal with this aspect of their experiences at all, except to say it was difficult to get him to wear pants. In fact, it kind of seemed like the family had kind of given up on doing some of the tough things that are necessary battles for kids with Down and instead were repeatedly choosing the path of least resistance, even if it wasn’t in Jon’s best interests. That is, instead of a complex negotiation of guardianship and autonomy, they have moved from unilateral attempts to get Jon not to embarrass them to a sort of laughing permissiveness whose underlying feature is “oh he’s so cute and simple and it makes him happy!”

In fact, the whole thing seemed rather self-serving. Since I can’t remember any specific quotations from the documentary, I’ll give you an example from the website:

Before Jon came to live with us, we were just a typical family of 5. Dad was a family doctor and Mom helped him in the office.

After Jon came home to live with us, he became a central focus of the family. Jon brought our family together and we found ourselves changing to accommodate him. We became less focused on ourselves and more involved with helping each other. Because of that, we actually became more popular at school with many people expressing that our family was an inspiration to them.

There have been studies that show that siblings of people who have mental retardation are more responsible, more independent, patient and compassionate, and oftentimes assume leadership roles in humanistic fields.

Um, right.

I will also admit that you can learn a lot about yourself while working with people who have mental disabilities. But their reason for existing is NOT to teach “normal” people cute little lessons all wrapped up in bows. (If a kid with Down Syndrome is in an institution with no one to learn about life’s simplicity from him, does he make a sound?)

In fact, the author was hoping that other people would learn the sort of lesson she did about Jon, that we should be “creating a feeling [of] connection for anyone with a disability.” I’ve heard a lot of arguments about the importance of personal pathos as socially transformative, the solution to racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and I think it’s a nice idea but ultimately a crock of shit. I have a problem with the supposed goodness of good feeling, especially when it’s mostly for one’s own benefit. I think the ADA was legal precedent has been infinitely better than watching Jon’s family get a kick out of his antics.

I didn’t see any real soul-searching in this documentary, and if the family has done that, it wasn’t done in front of the camera or included in the final edit. I thought the answers they were pushing were too easy and that they didn’t even address the hard questions. They didn’t even mention that they had again become overwhelmed with care for Jon and that the family had put Jon back into a group home at the age of 30. But Jon got sick. The family’s struggle to care for Jon, according to the website, is now eased by supplemental care from two case workers from the Community Alternative Program, a medicaid waiver program that “prevents people from being institutionalized.”

Sometimes there’s a dark, patronizing side to the model of charity that The Teachings of Jon seems to promote. I suppose it’s the same problem I have with students who volunteered work with minority children in an afterschool program and then write essays I have to grade saying, “the strange little children were so delightful. I felt like I was in Anna and the King!” We have enough stories about Anna.